You'll recall, a couple of blogs back, that I wrote a piece about perception, In it, I described how marketers take advantage of your preconceptions to sell you stuff.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, there's a fascinating study reported on the Science Daily website that explains some of the brain function associated with brand familiarity.
Researchers at at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich monitored the brain activity of test subjects with an MRI while they showed them images of "strong" (very well known) and "weak" (not so well known) brands.
When the subjects were shown strong brand images, the parts of their brains responsible for familiarity and positive emotional association lit up. When they were shown weak brands, the parts of their brains responsible for memory retrieval and negative emotion lit up.
Of course, if you understood the power of Form over Substance, this will come as no surprise but now, it's measureable. Scientists can now quantify in hard data what focus groups could only guess at. The consequences are both fascinating and terrifying.
I wish Pandora wouldn't keep leaving so many boxes around for guys like these to open.
4 comments:
Thank you for your recent kind comments on my blogs. I came across yours sometime in September and have enjoyed reading it since then. The provocative mixture of personal insight and current affairs makes me want to pay more attention to the external world...as you might deduce I live in a fantasy world.
M/B/P, I like your fantasy world. I envy it. The real world so often sucks.
And I'm gratified that you enjoy my musings. Thank you for continuing to take an interest in what this straw brain is thinking.
My dear Chester - if straw brains think do they therefore have those neuro-synapse things that link up in epiphaneous moments? Like the light bulb that goes off over one's head???
Oh no. Straw brains work differenly. If we had those neurothingmys, the straw might catch fire.
Post a Comment